團隊

We exploit the implementation of a rural pension policy in China to estimate the average rural-to-urban migration cost for workers affected by the policy and the average underlying sectoral productivity difference. Our estimates, based on a large panel data set, reveal significant migration costs and substantial sectoral productivity differences, with sorting playing a minor role in accounting for sectoral labor income gaps. We construct and structurally estimate a general equilibrium household model with endogenous labor supply and migration. The results of this model align with the reduced-form findings and illustrate how the rural pension policy influences migration, GDP, and welfare through improving within-household labor allocation. Counterfactual analyses based on the model show that the positive effects of the policy remain even if migration costs were significantly lower, and that scaling up the rural pension policy would lead to even larger improvements in labor allocation, GDP, and welfare.

This paper studies the impact of the US-China tariff war on China, using high-frequency night lights data and grid-level measures of tariff exposure. Exploiting within-grid variation over time and controlling extensively for grid-specific contemporaneous trends, we find that each one-percentage-point increase in exposure to the US tariffs was associated with a 0.59% reduction in night-time luminosity. This impact was highly skewed across locations: Grids with negligible direct exposure to the US tariffs accounted for 70% of China’s population. But the tail 2.5% of China’s population with the highest exposure saw an implied 2.52% (1.62%) decrease in income per capita (employment) relative to unaffected grids. These effects were moreover concentrated in locations with a high commuting openness. By contrast, we do not find significant effects from China’s retaliatory tariffs, and offer evidence of several channels through which the impact on imported inputs was mitigated. In a parallel analysis at the prefecture level, we confirm that the US tariffs had discernible negative aggregate consequences.

信息集、個人期望和喜好都是政客作出政治決策時的重要考慮因素，但这些因素并不能被直接观测。中國加入世界貿易組織的進程橫跨二十年，期間美國眾議院對是否給予中國正常貿易關係地位進行了多次投票。我們对國會議員掌握的信息集进行弱假设，並採用矩不平等的方法分析相關數據，確保估算一致。這種研究方法能可靠地測試政客在決策時所掌握的資訊，並估計選民、意識形態及其他因素對政策制定和投票時的影響力。